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Great Project Management

You've defined a great product, and everyone is excited to build it. Now it's time to start the third phase of product development: execution.

To execute, you need to help your team navigate through the following stages:

Figure 7. The execution phase of product development.

1. Kick-Off

During the kick off stage, your goal is to help your team build a shared understanding of the PRD and the project’s key milestones:

• Review the PRD. Hold a kickoff meeting and walk your team through the customer problem, goal, and product requirements. Leave time to answer questions.
• Set clear milestones. Work with your engineering manager to break the product requirements into tickets and ask your engineers to estimate how long each ticket will take. Group tickets into milestones with clear dates and exit criteria. For example, a milestone could be completing the backend service before tackling the user interface. Two milestones that every project should have are dogfood and launch.
• Create one channel for communication. After the kickoff meeting, create a project channel and invite all stakeholders to it. Pin the PRD, milestones, designs, tickets, and any other relevant materials to the channel. You're now ready to build the product!

2. Kick-Off → Dogfood

During the kick-off → dogfood stage, 1 your goal is to help your team stay focused on shipping. To do this, you need to:

• Communicate constantly. Set up weekly team meetings to review progress and identify blockers. Post notes from every meeting in your project channel so that everyone is on the same page.
• Manage dependencies. Hopefully, you’ve already established shared OKRs with teams upon which your project has dependencies. Even with shared OKRs, teams can still fall behind on their work, and miscommunications can happen. That's why it's essential to communicate regularly, especially when two teams are working together for the first time.
• Address risks and blockers. During development, unexpected blockers or risks can surface. Perhaps an engineer will ask you to cut scope because a ticket is taking much longer to complete than expected. Or maybe you've uncovered new user research that requires additional product changes. We’ll discuss this more in the Making Good Decisions chapter.

3. Dogfood → Launch

During the dogfood → launch stage, your goal is to help your team squash bugs and get ready for launch.

• Test rigorously. Be alert and pay attention to the details to avoid delays close to launch. Test the product rigorously yourself to set the example for your team. When you reach dogfood, send an e-mail asking people in your organization to test the product and create a feedback channel for them to report bugs. Invite everyone in the feedback channel to bug bashes. A constant stream of feedback is the lifeblood of high-quality products.
• Build a launch checklist. A simple checklist will help ensure that everyone knows what they need to do to get ready for launch. Review your list regularly with your team to stay on track.

Figure 8. An example launch checklist that includes a list of tasks, owners, dates, and current status .

4. Launch → Retro

During the launch → retro stage, your goal is to celebrate shipping with your team while paying attention to customer feedback and metrics.

• Celebrate the launch. Launch day is a time for celebration. Email your organization to let people know that the product has shipped and publicly thank everyone who contributed.
• Monitor post launch activity. As the product owner, it’s your job to keep a close eye on how your product is doing. Look for early feedback from customers and metrics. By monitoring post-launch activity and quickly fixing issues that come up, you can accelerate growth for a product that otherwise would have faltered. Remember that your success is measured by whether you solved the customer problem and grew your goal metric, not by shipping the product.
• Hold a team retro. Discuss with your team what went well, what went wrong, and what the learnings were while working on the project. The more lessons you can identify and internalize as a team, the better your team will become at navigating the “understand, identify, and execute” loop.

Now that we covered each stage of the execution phase, let’s dive into several essential skills that you need to navigate the product development loop.